SECRET ORIGINS!
by Spawn Guy
Summary: He really hates those things.


TMNT belong to _You-Know-Who_.

Lyrics stolen at light speed from _The Ballad Of Barry Allen _by _Jim's Big Ego_.

---

_I've got time to think of the beauty of a thousand variations  
Of the beating of a wing  
Of a hummingbird suspended in the aspic of the world  
Moving slower than molasses  
As I'm off to catch the girl  
Who is falling off the bridge  
_

---

"How does your spine bend?" Casey says.

I look up from bandaging his hand, trying to avoid tugging too tight.

"Buh?" I say intelligently.

"Your spine." Casey gestures at my back. Or my shell rather. "I've seen you guys back flip and summersault with your shells, and…I just wondered how you…you know."

Now would be the point where I put some extra pressure on his hand, but I'm all for breaking stereotypes and clichés so I just tie it off and leave it to set properly. We owe it to the guy after he broke it punching a zombie polar bear in the face. Stockman is becoming less of an oddity to me the more of these things we get into.

"My spines inside my back and covered with flesh. My shell dosen't bend but my spine does. I just tuck my arms and legs in like a regular athlete, and make a ball out of myself. My shells round enough to allow that."

"Oh. Cool."

I give him a nod and go back to my copy of Scientific America.

I don't-

Mind if I trail off here? I'll get more focused as we go, that's how this usually goes.

Anyway, I love Mike. I really do. Tell him and you shall never be allowed to sleep through a single night until death do us part, but I do. And that in no way stops him being a bigger geek than I am. The dude freaks over comics.

For five mutants living in a renovated pumping station, we have a hell of a lot of books. Don't read most of them when we have a big screen TV and 24 hours of _House_, but we have them. Half of those are from Mike's collection but next to his shelves full of rescued paper backs and thrift store bargain bin novels (God bless you, April O'Neil) are his long boxes.

It'd be nice if those boxes were full, instead of simply overflowing and most of they're contents all over the floor. I'm not complaining you understand, I'm a fan of the Sunday funnies (if, y'know, anyone still calls them that) and Leo's a closet Superman fan.

Yeah, no comment.

But anyway, Mike dosen't read as much superhero stuff as you'd think. The long boxes are almost bursting for Amazing Spider-Man, The Flash, Invincible, Stormwatch, Action Comics, Astonishing X-Men, Green Arrow…about a hundred others. But the stuff all over the floor? The stuff he actually reads? Zot!, Maus, 2000 A.D, Alice in Sunderland, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Preacher, Astro City, Bone, Promethia, Grendel, Tank Girl, Sandman (Neil Gaiman writes comics. Who knew.) Asterix, V for Vendetta, Cerebus The Aardvark , Shonen Jump, bunch of Fantagraphics and manga books…

The thing I like about what little I've read of those…there's none of this: somewhere buried under all of the above is a collection of the early 1930's Batman (or Bat_-Man_) comics. There's this one page. You know the one. _The Bat-Man! Who he is and how he came to be! _Two pages. Bang bang. Thomas and Martha dead. Little crying kid. Mr Atlas muscle lifting, a Bunsen burner, bat through the window. Batman. In two pages.

Yuck.

There's a parody on Jay Pinkerton's website. Go laugh at it. It's funny because it's true.

As a scientist I spend most of my time summing up what I know in chunks. It's like asking the master cosmic backer supreme to feed his complete chocolate replica of the British Isles to the starving in suppository sized brownies. I like long winded explanations, damn it!

And you, dear victim, are trapped. You want to know my origon, secret or not? Wipe your feet and park your fanny. No two page cop out here.

The Turtle Titan (it looks worse when you begin a sentence with it because you have to put everything in upper case) is still a reserve Justice Force member, even if he's been seen by about three people in the entirety of his career and has a secret photobucket account that no one ever visits full of photos of himself posing in full dress regalia in front of the mirror. And sometimes simply in his mask. Nevertheless, this somehow qualifies him and the guests of his choice to attend their annual barbecue. I'm as surprised as the next mutant (take your pick) that super heroes have time to eat, but there you go.

And so we race the Slider out to their headquarters on Staten Island. Turns out we're early. It's pretty much what you'd expect; the lobby looks like the ballroom of the Titanic. All golden arches and mahogany and little baby universes in jars. I hear Nobody dosen't actually come here much apart from monitor duty. Wonder why.

So we're about an hour late to be ten hours late, and thus have about nine hours to kill. We're teenagers surrounded by _Authorized Personnel Only _markings, what the hell do you think we did? Mike's reserve card got us past about thirty levels of green level access doors before we hit blue and gold access and had to back out. For the centre of the planet's small metahuman community most of the Justice Fortress is an office block with a museum underneath, so…pretty much your typical museum.

We're trying to turn around, arguing over which of us is tapping into that famous infallible sense of ninja direction when Raph, sorcerer supreme of subtlety that he is, knocks over this giant pithos with a broad sweep of his arm meant to indicate that the way out is in fact over there. Right through that brick wall festooned with Mayan face masks and shields from a race of extraterrestrial Amazons.

That old turtle luck being what it is, this artefact is in actual fact the mystically reinforced prison of _Pandoramonium The Living Virus_, the creature that coulda woulda shoulda been the last evil out of Pandora's box if that pesky Hope hadn't reduced it to vapour before it escaped and bought _A Fate Worse Than Death _down upon the newly born human race.

Allegedly.

The only reason I know all this is because I read the little plaque underneath it after the Silver Sentry himself caught the thing with a hand that's three picoseconds ahead of the time it takes you to snap your fingers.

So, yeah. Dodged a bullet there. Dodged an asteroid.

He took it pretty well, considering. Stop one apocalypse stopped them all I guess. It was all smiles a little more genuine than on the magazine covers and warm handshakes and "Let's look with our eyes next time, huh fellas?". He's a little self conscious about his grip, and with good reason. Try picking up a boulder with one hand. That's the kind of strain your under for that couple of seconds. And that's the guy holding back.

Turns out the barbecue is on _Wednesday_, but the Sentry's a decent guy even when he's not hamming it up for the sound bites so (if you'll allow me to change tenses, gentle reader) we were given the free tour of the gold level floors. The hanger for Phoenix-1, the Force's jet who's design specs I would kill over and believe me that threat is not made lightly, the meeting room which isn't as impressive as you'd think a giant round table with about twenty hundred seats could be, and then?

Then, Tiger, I hit the jackpot.

Professor Honeycutt, god love him, walks around in the body of a SAL unit. To him, this is a vacuum cleaner. To me, it's where we should be right now so we can get around to all that interesting transhumanism and get that selfish jerk Baxter to quit holding out on us. For a group of people who's god like abilities boil down to essentially punching people very hard in the face, the Justice Force is actually a very cerebral team. The way they cobbled their lab out of stuff pushed far out over the cutting edge and reverse engineered technology from the billions of alien cultures they've encountered? It shows.

Even Raph was speechless.

While we were meandering around like drugged frat boys at their first rave, the Sentry sits himself down at one of the big ovoid tables and opens up a laptop. This dose not sound special, but it is because this this thing is an ancient Dell dredged up out of 1998. The world's greatest superhero is standing in something out of the mind of Tony Stark and he's typing on something I used to build a remote controlled toy car when I was nine.

I couldn't help myself. I peeked.

It was a medical read out from one of the highly advanced CAT scanners down in the med bay. One of about five things on this planet that can penetrate the Sentry's skin. Well, not penetrate but certainly tell you what this guy is made of. I didn't realise it at first because I wasn't sure what the hell I was actually looking at until I realised he'd downloaded a sonogram of himself. Focusing on his….

Well.

Ultrasound. This guy didn't want to know how invincible he was, he wanted to know how thick his skin was. There was also a simulation of fertilization produced God knows how. I didn't see how that went because he hurriedly shut the laptop and gave me a magazine smile. And in that instant where he snapped the top down I caught the flash of the ring on his finger.

I'm guessing somebody wants to ram _Woman Of Kleenex_ down Larry Niven's big fat throat.

The fact he'd do this for her…

I don't know how it went or who she is. That's embarrassing because I awkwardly offered to do some research work for him along with a bunch of scientist friends of his (never found out who _they_ were either) and he awkwardly agreed. I had to let him down at the end because, hey, as it turns out a mutant isn't the best guy to ask about mutations. I have no idea if they could have…y'know. But hey, I got his secret origin out of the deal!

He's an author. Don't ask me which one, and don't tell him I told you that he told me. He got his powers in the split second before he would have been disintegrated after being hit by a white dwarf fragment while stargazing in California. Before you say anything…me? I got hit by radioactive mutagen as baby when I fell into the New York City sewer system.

You won't find that story in the Sentry's wiki entry. It's a raindrop sized lightning fork of a glance at who and what this guy really is, but you _need_ that to build an opinion. Not form one, that sounds like when life flopped out of the river. Well, no, that's not fair, but it sounds like the idea people have in their heads when you bring it up. Formed. A rough draft. So far to go. Legs to small to make it so it becomes something else. A cartoon character. It's already there for you up on the big screen, why build a time machine and actually find out?

So yeah. Formed. And as much as I love you, old pal of mine, I know you're doing this.

The Silver Sentry is a superhero. The Silver Sentry is invincible. The Silver Sentry isn't human. The Silver Sentry isn't a guy who has to be careful not to break your hand, doesn't have to go to bed knowing that he can do it, doesn't turn over in the night to look at his wife and burn his brains out wondering if he can stop all this and have kids someday.

You'll make up your mind and wait for a movie or another Year One miniseries to tell you everything. And you can't do that to real people. You all do and it's not fair. I judge as one who has been accused and convicted of this crime, by myself, with myself. And been left even more aware of how much it's actually done to me. And how much I do it to others.

Casey asked a question a few lifetimes ago. You probably forgot, I almost did. He asked about what I was. He's my friend. He knows _who_ I am. Mild curiosity about what I am? That only adds to that.

So he gets the two panel short story on the page before the adverts for plastic vomit and X-ray specks and Mr Atlas training.

You? You're not that special.

Who am I? How did I come to be?

Yeah, well. Tough luck. I'm not telling. Wouldn't if I could. Play detective and talk to me.

My name is Donatello. Pleased to meet you.

---

_And I'm there before you know it  
I'll be gone before you see me  
Do you think you can imagine  
Anything so lonely?_


End file.
